Report: Mexico’s Illegal Migrant Truckers Push U.S. Truckers Off The Road

U.S. trucking companies are undermined by lower-wage Mexican truckers who use B-1 visitor visas to snatch delivery contracts from American truckers after they deliver a load from Mexico, says a May 8 article on the FreightWaves.com website.

“I closed in December because I saw what was going to happen,” one former owner of a trucking company told Freightwave.com. “There was no reason to try and keep up with the B-1 drivers nonsense — no one really understands what’s happened, and there’s too many [business] interests in between,” the owner said.

“Look at I-35 coming out of Laredo: All you see is the Mexican trucks coming across going north, and nine out of 10 trucks are B-1 drivers; it’s just getting out of hand,” another owner told the site. He added:

I’m an owner-operator. I have a few trucks that I operate as a regional hauling business, but I can’t compete with the B-1s … You have a lot of B-1 drivers, they take less pay, and you lose work because they can get the work. I can’t afford to drop down on my rates. Nobody will be making money, right?

NAFTA made it legal for Mexican drivers to deliver Mexican cargo to U.S. destinations and then go home. But many Mexican drivers use their B-1 visitor visas to stay on in the United States for some time — while illegally delivering U.S. cargo from sellers to buyers.

“A vast majority of people have jumped into this in the last few years, and they’re cheating the system and nobody’s doing anything about it,” said the owner of a trucking company.

The Mexican drivers can get the cargo contracts directly from brokers or directly from U.S. companies that illegally hire the lower-wage Mexican drivers. Some Mexican companies are setting up subsidiaries in the United States to help win orders for the illegal migrant drivers, the site reported.

In Canada, drivers use the H-2A agricultural worker visa to take truckers’ jobs in Maine.